MANILA, Philippines - With teaser videos for Snow White and the Huntsman and Mirror, Mirror released just days apart, moviegoers got a taste of next year’s fairy-tale two-punch. The first, a grown-up version of the treasured children’s story, boasts Kristen Stewart in the title role, a portrayal that could either prove that, indeed, there’s more to the 21-year-old star than meets the eye or confirm what her critics have sadly predicted: She is only capable of being Bella Swan. Director Rupert Sanders’ project, already garnering praise for its superb photography, appears to be in the mold of an epic action fantasy, with Chris Hemsworth as the huntsman showing off his Thor weapons training.
The agenda of Mirror, Mirror, on the other hand, seems to be lighter and more whimsical. Helmed by Tarsem Singh, recently responsible for Immortals, the adaptation sees Lily Collins — she of Abduction and those distracting Sandy Cohen eyebrows — stepping properly into the spotlight. There’s a lot of silliness in the trailer, which could prove to be a hit with kids or teens who have yet to learn to be more discerning. One dwarf utters “Snow White? Snow Way!” so clearly it seeks to paint a totally different — perhaps Disney-ish — picture.
Media-skewering site Gawker, meanwhile, isn’t optimistic about either version. “Mirror was directed by Tarsem Singh, while Huntsman was directed by deviantART; Mirror stars Julia Roberts with a dodgy accent, while Huntsman stars Charlize Theron with a dodgy accent…They’ll both be bad, but [Mirror, Mirror] might actually be worse…” All the hype takes me back to Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, a retelling of another Brothers Grimm fable that had the potential to be clever but instead ended up tragically Twilight-y.
Tale as old as time
“Once upon a time,” according to website TV Tropes, may be a stock phrase that’s older than print, but that hasn’t stopped the television industry from mining too-familiar material. NBC’s Grimm, for instance, is a procedural drama with a bedtime-story twist. Inspired by the 18th century German academics from whom it borrows its name, the freshman series stars David Giuntoli as Nick Burkhadrt, a homicide detective who learns that he descends from an ancient family charged with keeping humans safe from mythological creatures.
While the pilot was interesting enough, succeeding episodes have not invested in enough magic to create an alternate world and, in fact, have been bogged down by both questionable CGI and characters a viewer would not care about. Grimm, for all its supposed novelty, feels a little too routine to make a dent in the long term.
That said, ABC’s Once Upon A Time looks to be gaining its footing after a rather shaky start. Featuring Ginnifer Goodwin, Emilie De Ravin, Jamie Dornan and Rupert Carlyle, the Sunday show revolves around a woman who is drawn to a small town in Maine where the mystery of fairy tales may just be real. That it has been nominated for a 2012 People’s Choice Award for “Favorite New TV Drama” is a great indication that the genre may have a rosy future ahead.
Happily never after?
So, given that we live in a more cynical age, is there room in our lives for childhood fantasy, even modernized ones? It appears that we have gradually shed our collective naïveté since the days of Charles Perrault, the 17th century French author who laid the foundations for the fairy tale. In the ’90s, James Finn Gardner published Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, which satirized the censorship of children’s literature and in 2005, Terry Gilliam’s little-seen Brothers Grimm, starring Heath Ledger and Matt Damon, depicted the siblings not as beloved storytellers of European folk tales but as travelling con-artists in French-occupied Germany during the late 18th century.
Even the reliable Disney has not been immune to being deromanticized. Early this year, in February, Hipster Disney Princess memes, led by Ariel, took over the Internet. The movement has since expanded to lay its Photoshopped black-rimmed spectacles and snarky captions over a wide swath of female characters, from Jasmine and Belle to Cinderella and Pocahontas. Then, in true meta-ironic fashion, the really cool Internet geeks got into Hipster Disney Villains.
“By their archetypal quality, fairy tales are templates whose reinventions tell us about ourselves, now and timelessly,” wrote the Financial Times’ Jackie Wullschlager. Since challenging times call for even more escapist fare, we should expect entertainment to be even more removed from reality. In 2012, from March to June, that would translate thus: two mirrors, two evil queens, two fairest maidens and 14 dwarves.
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